Valentine's Date Night at the LUX - fused glass plates

The Party Table!

What better way to spend Valentine's Day, than hanging out with your sweetie and being creative with glass?!? That's what we did this year at the LUX Center for the Arts in historic University Place, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Christy and Carl with an OU plate?

Six couples joined me for music, treats and fused glass fun! We all worked on plates (and pendants or sun catchers).

Fused and Slumped Sampler Platters

The Sampler Platter fused glass class is officially over and it was incredibly successful! I'm so happy with the plates that my students put together!


This is a detail shot of one of the plates. You can see the blue tile in the middle that was made during the frit, powder and stringer session has been capped with clear glass and accented with a tea light flame worked star-shaped stringer. As always, the dichro bits just don't photograph as strikingly as they appear in person.

This plate makes me think outer space, galaxy, the next frontier...Cool, huh? Great job, Alycia!


My plate was not as successful...Don't get me wrong, it showcased every possible technique I could think of for a beginners' class, to a fault! Unfortunately, some incompatible glass found it's way into my scrap bin. What?!? How the heck did that get there?!?

So, how do you tell it's incompatible? Well, if you've been following me for long, then you know I've run into this problem before...and thankfully, it's only MY plate that's ever affected! So, as soon as this plate made it's way out of the kiln, I knew something was amiss...

If you look closely at this photo, you can see the hairline fractures at the edge of the two blue squares. See that? That's incompatibility. The crack follows those blue pieces too well to be anything else! And guess what else? When I scored my plate to free the pieces, the knocks with the hammer (gentle taps on the underside of the score) broke those pieces out almost perfectly! So, after removing the blue glass, I refilled the voids with some aventurine green scrap pieces to melt back down into one. It's currently in the kiln, and with any luck will be a slumped platter within 24 hours!

Here is the other platter from the class that is awaiting a slump firing. It is also currently in the kiln. My new-ish Paragon Pearl-22 and I are still getting to know each other. The first firing just didn't fire hot enough or long enough and I wasn't happy with the fact that you could feel the seam between pieces on the underside of the plate. With Pooja's permission, I also drilled a little hole in the middle to see if I could squeeze the biggest bubble out. We'll soon see how well that turned out!

Playing with Powders, Frits, Stringers, and bits...

In this week's "Sampler Platter Class," we played with powdered glass, frits, stringers and scrap glass bits. In preparation for this class, I went to Hobby Lobby and spent an hour and a half scavenging for useful templates to use with our sifted powders. I found some little adhesive dots sheets in the scrapbook section, some plastic needlepoint canvases, a couple of orange rubber painting combs, and a multitude of other things that I didn't go looking for, but couldn't pass up. (NOTE: I've placed links on the items that I bought because I was too lazy to add pictures of them, and I didn't describe them very well.)

[SAFETY NOTE: When using glass powders, make sure to wear a dust mask and work in an area free of drafts to avoid breathing glass!]


















Here are some before and after pictures of the pieces that my students and I worked on. You can see that when you're applying powders, you really have to apply them in a thick layer, otherwise they just disappear after they're fired in the kiln. Opal powders (opaque) will show up better than transparent powders will. I've posted some closeups of the pieces so you can examine them both before and after to see the change in colors and texture. I fired them at 1440 degrees F and held for only 5 minutes.



















On the opal blue tiles, I believe it was pumpkin orange powder (opal) that was sifted on the pieces. You can see how much it disappears after it's been fired, even though it looks like it's on fairly thick and is perfectly visible unfired.



















On the clear tiles, the same pumpkin orange opal powder was sifted on and you can see that it was put on much thicker than on the opal blue tiles. It also still looks transparent after firing although it's an opal powder.



















On the pink opal tiles, I used (yes, again) the pumpkin opal powder. I used the No Days Mosaic Adhesive and a paper punch flower tool to create the adhesive shapes that I wanted. After I arranged them in the spots where I wanted them, I held the glass tile over a candle flame until the adhesive started to melt. Then, I sifted the powder on heavily, let the glass cool down and knocked off the excess powder. On the other tile, I drew a squiggle with fuser's glue and sifted powder on top of it. Then, I knocked off the excess.
























My class is playing with different techniques and materials used in glass fusing, but the ultimate idea is that when we are done, they will have a plate that incorporates all the different sample tiles we are making.























Whether or not the sample tiles are judged "successful" as a whole won't matter so much in the end piece as the tiles will potentially be cut up into smaller pieces and reassembled.


















Using powders, frits, stringers, etc. to alter a piece of glass and create texture and pattern is a favorite technique of mine. I feel it really enhances the final piece as the piece is truly original and less generic.


















With last week's painted pieces, I've already created some great quilted brooches and quilted coasters. With the intention of creating even more quilted plates, I've filled the empty space in my kiln with larger pieces of opal glass that I've dusted with powdered designs. I'll end up cutting these up to incorporate into quilted plates.